California Retrospective: The struggles of being disabled before ramps, special parking, legal protections

As the nation marks the 25th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act, it’s hard to imagine the challenges of creating an independent life in a wheelchair before the government required accommodations.

Back then, disabled people struggled to cross streets, park their cars and find alternatives to stairs — all big barriers to holding a job.

Making cities more accessible came into focus in the early 1970s as wounded Vietnam War veterans in wheelchairs tried to enter the workforce.

They found their wounds were just one of the challenges.

“The minute a wheelchair comes into a place, people just stop and look. They don’t want to, but they do,” one Orange County veteran told The Times in 1970. “You can kind of read their mind; they think, ‘Poor thing in a wheelchair.’”

“You go someplace and the first thing you run into is a 10-inch curb. I can’t even count the times I’ve fallen out of my chair going downhill or over curbs,” another vet said.

Los Angeles and other cities began adding ramps to some curbs — despite criticism that the inclines were a waste of money and could cause sidewalks to flood during heavy rains. L.A. officials refuted the flooding worries and spent the next 40 years retrofitting curbs across the city.

Disabled people said one of the most difficult things about living in L.A. was the parking in a city dominated by cars.

A wrenching story in The Times about one man’s struggles touched a nerve among readers:

It takes Les Jankey only seconds to ease his brown Pontiac Firebird into a parking space. It takes him three minutes to get out of the car. Wet with perspiration, he wrestles his 45-pound wheelchair from the back seat on the passenger side to the sidewalk. He opens the chair, lowers a … silicone cushion and lifts himself onto it.

That’s the easy part.

Often he finds no place to park because curbs are too high or cars in lots are jammed together too closely for him to get the chair out. Jankey, a 29-year-old psychologist born with malformed legs and external nerves instead of a spinal column, has begun to park illegally.

He has left his car in red and “No Parking Anytime” zones and has parked more than the legal 13 inches from the curb (… in order to open the door). He even has parked in the direction opposing traffic.

The result:

• An average of 10 parking tickets a month, dismissed in court because of his handicap;

• An arrest for 14 outstanding tickets because he didn’t pay the fines or go to court;

• A subsequent night in Los Angeles County Jail during which, he claimed, he wet himself because of a lack of facilities for the handicapped and a guard remarked on his indefensibility as “rape bait”;

• Two upcoming court appearances; in Beverly Hills Municipal Court on two parking tickets; and in West Los Angeles on four others.

The experience has convinced Jankey there should be a statewide or, better yet, a national solution to the parking problems of the handicapped.

“I can’t believe in this big ‘car state’ nothing has been done,” Jankey said. “My problem is not finding a meter but a place I can get out of. A good 75% of the spaces are unusable because of the height of the curb.”

By the mid-1970s, cities were beginning to use blue paint on the curb to designate special parking spaces reserved only for the disabled.

But many nondisabled drivers used the spaces, especially at supermarkets and shopping malls. Eventually, the state began handing out special placards to disabled drivers. It was only when the government boosted fines for parking in disabled spaces that scofflaws thought twice.

In 1975, The Times ran a front-page story proclaiming the political rise of disabled people:

A new political force is on the march in California and nationally, although many of the marchers cannot even walk. The physically handicapped, numbering an estimated 2 million persons in California and 20 million in the nation, are becoming what one of their leaders called “pushy” about opening public facilities to their wheelchairs.

They are applying pressure to obtain what the able-bodied take for granted: a drink of water within reach, a building one can enter from the front and in which all rooms are accessible, a sidewalk that can be traveled and an intersection that can be crossed. The handicapped require a few construction modifications that the able-bodied, including able-bodied architects and developers, often don’t think about.

The handicapped are pushing down the barriers by mastering the techniques of other minority groups: organization, lobbying, litigation, demonstrating and speaking up.

Some activists — and others — objected to the “pushy” description. But by then, it was clear those disabilities had found a voice.

shelby.grad@latimes.com